Book Review: The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert R. Reilly2 November 2011 Edward Cline

The Closing of the Muslim Mind should be required reading for anyone who hopes to argue effectively against Islamic jihad.

Even if one has read the Koran, or sampled its most outrageous verses, injunctions, and imperatives, or discussed Islam with other concerned individuals, nothing could better guarantee a fundamental and essential grasp of the utter irrationality of Islam than Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamic Crisis. This work can help one understand precisely why Islam is so intractably irrational and inherently violent. It renders irrelevant any hope or notion that Islam can be “tamed” or rendered “moderate” or redeemed as a benign faith.

What one will grasp is that Islam, that berserker ideology in a cilice rampaging around the world in pursuit of a global caliphate of totalitarianism, leaving countless dead and maimed and incalculable destruction in its wake, is irrational by intent, that is, it is explicitly, unapologetically, and irrevocably irrational and beyond the realm of reason. As Reilly brilliantly explains it, the Islam we know and fear today is a product of a deliberate, conscious rejection of reason, of causality, of reality, of comprehension.

No review of Reilly’s book would do it justice. Reilly has performed an intellectual feat and service of incalculable value. What follows here are merely highlights of some of the more salient points Reilly elucidates.

Reilly delves into the intellectual history of Islam, going back to the so-called “golden age” of Islam when it nearly conquered Europe, not long after Muslims had secured the Arabian Peninsula and spread their power over North Africa.